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PHOTOGRAPHER

By Dariusz JABLONSKI

Documentary - Completed 1998

- Year of production
- 1998
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- POLAND, FRANCE, GERMANY
- Director(s)
- Dariusz JABLONSKI
- Synopsis
- In 1987, a few hundred colour slides were discovered in a second-hand bookstore in Vienna that documented scenes from the Lodz ghetto during the Second World War. The slides - actually some of the first in the history of photography - were the work of Walter Genewein, Austrian citizen serving the Germans.
  Being an accountant in the ghetto's council, he wholeheartedly solicited for turning the ghetto into a prosperous and well-organised company. And since Genewein was not just an ambitious office worker, but also an enthusiastic photographer, he recorded the achievements of his "institution" with a photo camera. Genewein's slides have been used by the authors to show - both through them and, to some extent, in spite of them - the real history of the Lodz ghetto and the extermination of its inhabitants. They have juxtaposed Genewein's "genre" photographs with the recollections of Arnold Mostowicz, ex-doctor in the ghetto and the last surviving witness of the extermination.